Active IP probe based sampling of the mobile subscriber connection is established as the preferred methodology for measuring the end-to-end state and performance of the subscriber connection across the mobile network. Packet delay, packet loss and UDP/TCP throughput measurements can be estimated for troubleshooting, network characterization and application performance estimation on a per-subscriber basis. For instance, Iperf is a commonly used network testing tool that can create TCP and UDP data streams and measure the throughput of a network that is carrying them. Iperf has a client and server functionality, and can measure the throughput between two endpoints, either uni-directionally or bi-directionally.
The geographical location (e.g. device located at cell edge or near cell tower), the channel quality indicator, QoS class identifier, and the modulation and coding schemes for the downlink and uplink directions of the mobile subscriber connection have direct impact on the packet delay, packet loss and UDP/TCP throughput measurements. The radio node scheduling activity, radio node processor utilization and the number of subscribers in the cell serving the mobile subscriber may also positively or negatively impact the end-to-end performance.
Current active probe techniques are designed to measure the performance of the end-to-end mobile subscriber connection in terms of packet delay, packet loss and UDP/TCP throughput measurements but do not provide radio data to determine the actual conditions in which those measurements were performed. In addition, end-to-end IP test traffic initiated from the network or from the UE does not carry radio information describing the context and conditions in which those measurements were performed. Also, mobile device traces collected by the radio network enables the operator to record signaling events and UE-specific radio measurements but add significant stress to the network and do not measure the performance of end-to-end IP user plane subscriber connection. Radio-specific measurements that are triggered and collected by the UE do not measure the performance of the end-to-end IP subscriber connection and correlating UE-specific radio performance statistics produced by different entities (UE, eNB, etc) with the IP test traffic results is not trivial and requires additional post-processing of data from different nodes. Doing the correlation on a per packet basis is not supported.
Accordingly, it would be desirable to provide devices, systems and methods for measuring the performance of the end-to-end mobile subscriber connection in such systems that avoid the aforementioned described problems and drawbacks.